The SNR is the difference between the masking curve and the signal. AC-3 uses this value for each frequency bin to allocate bits. The snroffset parameter is a global adjustment to the SNR for all bins.

First, the excitation is calculated using parameters in s and the signal power in each critical band. The excitation is compared with a predefined hearing threshold table to produce the masking curve. If delta bit allocation information is provided, it is used for adjusting the masking curve, usually to give a closer match to a better psychoacoustic model.

This gives a rough estimate of signal power in the frequency domain by using the spectral envelope (exponents). The psd is also separately grouped into critical bands for use in the calculating the masking curve. 128 units in psd = -6 dB. The dbknee parameter in AC3BitAllocParameters determines the reference level.